Schemas Archives - SEO Ahmedabad

Google Search Console Adds New Reports For Review Snippets

Recently Google had announced that:

Google uses structured data standardized formats and shared schemas to provide information about a page and the things described by the page. This information is used for two main purposes:

Understand the content of the page
Enable special search result features and enhancements

Yesterday Google has announced:

We support review snippets in Google Search Console, and include new reports to help you find any issues with your implementation and monitor how this rich result type is improving your performance. You can also use the Rich Results Test to review your existing URLs or debug your markup code before moving it to production.

This is a clear indication that Google is giving more and more importance to Structured Data for various aspects.

Here Google clearly states that :

To help site owners make the most of their reviews, a new review snippet report is now available in Search Console for sites that have implemented reviews or ratings structured data. The report allows you to see errors, warnings, and valid pages for markup implemented on your site.

The Performance report shows the Review Snippet Results

The Search Console Performance report now allows you to see the performance of your review or rating marked-up pages on Google Search and Discover using the new “Review snippet” search appearance filter.

review-snippet1

This helps you filter your data to see which queries, pages, countries and devices are bringing your review snippets traffic.

Review snippet in Rich Results Test

Review-Test-Tool

After adding Review snippets structured data to your pages, you can test them using the Rich Results Test tool. You can test a code snippet or submit a URL of a page.

Schemas - 02/11/2020

SEO-Training-Ahmedabad-Management-Association

As of April 6, 2020, data-vocabulary.org markup will no longer be eligible for Google rich result features

Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content; for example, on a recipe page, what are the ingredients, the cooking time and temperature, the calories, and so on.

The use of structured data helps Google :

To Understand the content of the page
To Enable special search result features and enhancements

Structured data schemas such as schema.org and data-vocabulary.org are used to define shared meaningful structures for markup-based applications on the Web.

Google announced today as schema.org is more popular and is widely being used so they will focus only on one SD scheme that is schema.org.

From April 6, 2020 onwards, data-vocabulary.org markup will no longer be eligible for Google rich result features.

Starting today Google will warn the developers via search console regarding the pages using the data-vocabulary.org. This will help the developers to make the necessary amends on the pages to remain eligible for Google rich result features.

Google Search supports structured data in the following formats, unless documented otherwise:

Format	Description and Placement
JSON-LD* (Recommended)	JavaScript notation embedded in a <script> tag in the page head or body. The markup is not interleaved with the user-visible text, which makes nested data items easier to express, such as the Country of a PostalAddress of a MusicVenue of an Event. Also, Google can read JSON-LD data when it is dynamically injected into the page's contents, such as by JavaScript code or embedded widgets in your content management system.
Microdata	An open-community HTML specification used to nest structured data within HTML content. Like RDFa, it uses HTML tag attributes to name the properties you want to expose as structured data. It is typically used in the page body, but can be used in the head.
RDFa	An HTML5 extension that supports linked data by introducing HTML tag attributes that correspond to the user-visible content that you want to describe for search engines. RDFa is commonly used in both the head and body sections of the HTML page.

Google recommends using JSON-LD for structured data whenever possible.

Microdata is a component of HTML5 aimed at adding more semantics and contextual information to existing content on a page. By doing so, Microdata provides the search engines or browsers, with more information about the content of a page.

Microdata is an attempt to provide a simpler way of annotating HTML elements with machine readable tags than the similar approaches of using RDFa and Microformats.

Microdata vocabularies provide the semantics, or meaning of an Item. Web developers can design a custom vocabulary or use vocabularies available on the web.

A collection of commonly used (and Google Supported) Microdata vocabularies located at http://data-vocabulary.org which include: Person, Event,Organization, Product, Review, Review-aggregate, Breadcrumb, Offer, Offer-aggregate. Major search engines rely on this markup to improve search results. Content expressed as microdata on the web page gets correlated easily to the data vocabulary it is giving information about making it easy for the search engine find relevance and connectivity.

Google clearly mentions in its blog that in order to be eligible for Google rich result features we recommend converting your data-vocabulary.org structured data to schema.org.

For example, here is how you would change the data vocabulary to schema.org
Data-vocabulary.org

data vocabulary markup

Schema.org

In order to be sure that you are using the correct structured data format on the page you can test the page as follows:

You can test any code snippet live on Rich Results Test by pasting it into the search box.
You can test the page for structured data on the Structured Data Testing Tool
If you have any questions or comments, check out the Google Webmasters community.

Schemas - 01/21/2020

SEO Action Plan For The Knowledge Based Semantic Web

knowledge remix blog as a graph (Photo credit: g.janssen)

Author : Bharati Ahuja

The Wall Street Journal Post sometime back mentioned in the post that ….” Google is aiming to provide more relevant results by incorporating technology called "semantic search," which refers to the process of understanding the actual meaning of words.” Related to that we had posted our views on http://blog.webpro.in/2012/03/my-views-on-wsj-post-google-gives.html .

After the Panda and Penguin updates, Google on 16th May 2012 announced its Knowledge Graph on a blogpost titled , “Introducing the Knowledge Graph: things, not strings”.

In this article it is explained that :

The Knowledge Graph enables you to search for things, people or places that Google knows about—landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art and more—and instantly get information that’s relevant to your query. This is a critical first step towards building the next generation of search, which taps into the collective intelligence of the web and understands the world a bit more like people do.

Google’s Knowledge Graph isn’t just rooted in public sources such as Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook. It’s also augmented at a much larger scale—because we’re focused on comprehensive breadth and depth.

This is the first step to try to convert an information based engine to a knowledge based engine. This kind of engine is solely based on data and data relationships. Whatever useful information people are searching for offers valuable data for the knowledge graph which can be helpful to others searching on the same topic later.
The search queries help Google to add and correlate data thereby enriching the knowledge based search engine results. The information based search engine takes the string of words from the search query and maps it with the content indexed in the database and displays the sites responding strongly to the ranking factors in the algorithms in the SERPs.

In case of knowledge based search engine an additional dimension of the knowledge factor is added which is determined by the correlation, the relationship and how the content of the site is inter-linked with other entities on the web. This is one way the Knowledge Graph makes Google Search more intelligent. The results are more relevant because the search engine understands these entities, and the nuances in their meaning, the way you do. This makes the search engine think more like the user.

Google says…

“We’ve always believed that the perfect search engine should understand exactly what you mean and give you back exactly what you want. And we can now sometimes help answer your next question before you’ve asked it, because the facts we show are informed by what other people have searched for. “

How does one optimize a site for such a knowledge based search engine?

· Have loads of relevant knowledge rich content in all forms on your site.
· Share that content all over the web so that it gets correlated to the relevant topics and the relevant industry
· Every piece of content on the web is data . How well this data gets indexed and how well It get interlinked is important.
· Represent the following content on the site as microformats or as data :
Reviews
People
Products
Businesses and organizations
Recipes
Events
Video

To check your markup, use the rich snippets testing tool.

· Aim at establishing an authority and brand on social media
· Participate in discussions to put forward your opinion
· Have an active Google+ business page presence
· Use Google+ as a blogging platform
· Do not focus on Guest blogging and blog commenting for link building but post comments and guest blog for sharing your knowledge
· Forget about keywords and focus on the keyness
· Implement the hCard Code for the address on the contact page
· Do not neglect the On Page Optimization as the knowledge quotient will be applicable only if the relevant pages respond to the basic ranking factors.
· Keep improving the Technical aspect of SEO in response to the data received from Webmaster Tools

Bing / Google / Schemas / Semantic web / SEO - 05/19/2012

Is Your Website Markup Enriched To Support The Rich Snippets Updated By Google?

Author : Bharati Ahuja

The latest buzz in the SEO world has the surround sound on the topic of “Semantic Web and Semantic Search”. This is the next step of the ever evolving SEO and it brings in an era where SEO’s have to give importance to microformats, schemas and go beyond the word to word mapping and focus on the meaning of the content of the website and try to correlate it with the meaning of the query being searched on the search engine.

The search engines have been working on semantic search since the advent of web 2.0. Google also has been supporting and promoting content by displaying the Rich Snippets in the search results.

Some of the type of content given priority by Google for Rich Snippets display in SERPs is:

Reviews
People
Businesses and organizations
Recipes
Events
Video

Yesterday , Google has announced the Product Rich Snippets too. The Rich Snippets Tool which verifies the structured data markup has been upgraded to support HTML Input also.

Rich snippets help you to:

Attract potential buyers while they are searching for items to buy on Google.
Submit your product listings for free.
Control your product information. You can maintain the accuracy and freshness of your product information, so your customers find the relevant, current items they're looking for.

If you're a merchant, you can give Google detailed product information we can use to display rich snippets (for example, price, availability, and review ratings) right on our search results pages. (Right now, shopping rich snippets appear on search results pages only in the US—but we're working hard to make them available everywhere.)

Rich Snippets: Product Search

Product markup allows you to provide Google with specific information about the products on your site. Information about price, availability, reviews and more may be used in search results to help users more quickly and accurately identify relevant content. Visit http://www.schema.org/Product for more details.

More details on the Product Rich Snippets on http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=146750

A Product can include an Offer or Offer-aggregate; or an Offer or Offer-aggregate can include one or more Products. Use the structure that works best for your content.

A Product snippet should have details about :

Name Of The Product
The Image Of The Product
The Brand Of The Product
The Category Of The Product
Review About The Product
Identifier Which Includes Brand and Product Identification
Offer Details

Rich snippets add the logical meaning to the data and support semantic search but, just because the content on the page is expressed in mark up which supports the rich snippets and has been verified by the snippets tool, it is not certain to rank in the SERPs unless it is inter-linked by various quality signals from the social and the meta web.

Hence the SEOs now apart from the other on-page factors have to ensure that that atleast the content related to products, reviews, people, recipies, Address (using hCard) video, business and organizations are represented in the correct markup which has a potential to generate a rich snippet in SERPs and search visibility on various search options.

Schemas / SEO - 04/17/2012

An Introduction To Schemas And Schema.org

Author : Bharati Ahuja

Earlier this month Google , Bing and Yahoo in the spirit of sitemaps.org had come together to provide a shared collection of schemas that webmasters can use.

Search engines have been supporting Microformats and dealing with structured markup individually as per their algorithms but as the search engines for quite some time now . The search engines had come to a consensus on the submission of the list of URLs of a site in the form of an XML file as per www.sitemaps.org Now they have agreed to follow certain norms on data which is stored in structured HTML as per www.schema.org

A shared markup vocabulary makes easier for webmasters to decide on a markup schema and get the maximum benefit for their efforts. The no. of websites are increasing exponentially and as the sites are more focused on optimization for search engines and having a web presence on majority of the search options like videos, images, news, discussions, etc. the content embedded in HTML is increasing and the need to correlate the content to relevant search options and make it more easily available to the user on search engines a common set of schemas will surely make the web and search experience more structured and systematic for the users and the search engines .

The schemas are a set of 'types', each associated with a set of properties. The types are arranged in a hierarchy.
Browse the full hierarchy for schemas:

· Creative works: CreativeWork, Book, Movie, MusicRecording, Recipe, TVSeries ...

· Embedded non-text objects: AudioObject, ImageObject,

VideoObject

· Event

· Organization

· Person

· Place, LocalBusiness, Restaurant ...

· Product, Offer, AggregateOffer

· Review, AggregateRating

http://schema.org/docs/schemas.html

From the SEO perspective according to me these kind of collaborative efforts by search engines ensure the indexing as per more accurate relevance and correlation for search results and branding. I think this step of unitedly working on data formats for structured HTML will make the web experience qualitatively and quantitatively richer for the user and the search engines.

Bing / Google / Schemas / Semantic web / SEO - 06/13/2011

What is hCard Integration?

hCard is a simple, open, distributed format for representing people, companies, organizations, and places, using a 1:1 representation of vCard (RFC2426) properties and values in semantic HTML or XHTML. hCard is one of several open microformat standards suitable for embedding in HTML, XHTML, Atom, RSS, and arbitrary XML.

Microformats are a way of adding simple markup to human-readable data items such as events, contact details or locations, on web pages, so that the information in them can be extracted by software and indexed, searched for, saved, cross-referenced or combined.

Microformats are a way to use (X)HTML for data and a logical next step in the evolution of web design and information architecture and a way of thinking about data which combines html, content and presentation .

From the SEO perspective the most commonly used microformat is the integration of Hcard for the contact address on your website contact page.

If I write the contact address of my company without the using the hCard the HTML will be as follows:

If I integrate the hCard the HTML is as follows:

If you are using the hCard it is advisable to put only one address on the page but if you have to put more than one the change the div id="" class="vcard" tag accordingly for every address.

The code can be generated by using the hCard creator on the following link:

http://microformats.org/code/hcard/creator

Reference Reading:

http://www.microformats.org/wiki/hcard

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HCard

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/05/introducing-rich-snippets.html

Schemas / SEO - 05/18/2010